Play Skyrim, max settings, with AA at 4x and supersampling at 2x. It looks fantastic, thanks to how much transparency jaggedness you get without the SS, and it's a bit demanding so it's a good test of your rig. I can usually keep above 60, but occasionally my dense grass mod makes for a drop of about 10 frames per second.
ENB would be another good thing to play with, although honestly I'm not a fan (I'd rather take lots of AA than tonemapping that corrupts the image. Sure, the bloom is much nicer, but I can already get nice AO through drivers and generally don't mind the color of the game).
Obviously, Metro 2033 is a hell of a benchmark.
ArmA 2: Combined Operations is a really good CPU intensive game to push your rig, it takes a lot to render because it renders a hell of a lot of landscape, and is generally a good benchmark of your rig because, like 2033, it's not the best optimized game in the world.
I have a 3770k and a pretty damn fast 680 that struggles to keep above 45 in one particular area even without a lot of action in ArmA 2:OA (the city of Zargabad I believe).
I'd be curious to know how Deus Ex runs for you, I've had some minor issues with performance despite having as potent a rig as you can get without serious overclocking or SLI solutions/ $1000 CPUs.
Assassin's Creed 3 is a fantastic looking PC game that takes a lot to run as well. Sadly, being as you're running an ATI you won't be able to try the (IMO) excellent TXAA that is available to nVidia chaps like myself, but it still looks great and is one of the better AC games.
The original Crysis is always fun if you haven't ever had a rig that could play it at max settings and all that. It's a better game than Crysis 2, and in some ways I think better looking. Just get the crazy black hole grenade to push your rig a bit harder, and you'll have a fun time laughing at all the people spending thousands of dollars to run the game at those settings back when the game releaseed.
Obviously, Battlefield 3 is an excellent plaything for the graphics, assuming you don't mind being very, very bad at multiplayer shooters.
I would not suggest Far Cry 3. While it's a good game, it's got a lot of technical issues and is very poorly optimized. If you have a mate who has it on steam and is comfortable giving you quick access to their account to try it, do that before you get into it. Even the poorly optimized games on my list can be run pretty well with some tweaks to unimportant things (oh no, you can only see 2 kilometers instead of 5). I have a GTX680 that barely runs the game any bloody better at the lowest settings than it does at max with AA. And whenever I reach one of those enemy camps, the performance gets pretty rough. And from what I've seen, it's not an uncommon issue. It's an awesome game, but I couldn't stand the constant stuttering, the performance issues, etc, so I didn't play as much of it as I'd have liked. Just a warning, go there at your own peril.
Log in to comment